WebRTC, SIP and Open Standards

Some of the SIP proponents out there are not very happy about a recent JavaScript Object Rationale Draft that was published on the IETF RTCWEB mail list ahead of the WebRTC Expo in Atlanta. Full disclosure, I am one of the authors of that draft.

So, what’s all the hub-bub? Some of the reasoning seems to be..

SIP and XMPP are the standards, everything else should take a backseat.

The current WebRTC model should be the priority, stop asking for changes, you are just getting in the way of progress.

I understand the reasoning, I used to be one of those SIP advocates and I still believe that SIP has its place. To say that SIP and XMPP should rule all is just a bit much.

The one thing I am rather sure of is that SIP will not be the signalling protocol that ultimately ends up powering web communications. It’s just not practical. This doesn’t mean that SIP won’t be part of WebRTC, it just means that eventually we will move towards a more web-centric model.

To be clear, we are not against SDP in WebRTC. In fact, we believe that any API proposal should have both a lower-level Object model and also provide real support for SDP at a higher level.

To that end, we have created a new Object-RTC draft proposal that outlines this model in detail, which also supports SDP Offer / Answer. Yes, you can have have your cake and eat it too. This draft is about JavaScript, SDP (not baked into the browser) and the Open Web.

The question is, “When is the best time to submit the Object RTC proposal to the IETF and accompanying API docs to the W3C?”

We are not hell-bent on derailing the current progress being made in the respective working groups (contrary to what others may think). So potentially, you may not see the Object RTC draft in the wild before the conclusion of the next IETF meeting in Berlin, only a few short weeks away.

Here’s to making marked progress on v1 in Berlin so we can get on with 2.0.